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Print quality inspection made easy

An Industrial Vision Systems product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 26, 2004

Increasing quality demands in the pharmaceutical industry gives rise to increased automated inspection for manufacturers, as illustrated in a recent vision system application.

Increasing quality demands in the pharmaceutical industry gives rise to increased automated inspection for manufacturers.

A recent application involved print quality inspection of a syringe.

The complete part had to be inspected in a cycle time of less than 400ms, including communication with the host PLC.

Due to the cylindrical properties of the part, a high speed Firewire line-scan camera was chosen as it would be impossible to complete this application with area scan cameras.

The part was presented to the camera on driven cylinders which rotated the part on its axis within approximately 100ms, with a complete cycle of 390 degrees to confirm the complete part has been captured.

The synchronisation of the rotation speed of the line scan camera with the rotation of the cylinder was controlled by an encoder, which sat on the drive shaft of the cylinder.

The start position of the image capture is not defined, and so the first task within NeuroCheck is to bring the constantly shifting start position into line - this is completed through a preprocessing function within NeuroCheck called "adjust line-scan-image".

The image is manipulated via software control to give a constant start position to the image, this functionality is critical when completing line-scan applications.

After this step standard NeuroCheck functionality can be used.

For high speed evaluation all printed points of the part are assessed locally after position adjustment through the print quality inspection function.

The final step is to check all the clear areas for small print contaminations caused by splashes of ink, plus any other contamination.

The complete processing time varies between 0.2 and 0.3s for the print quality inspection functionality.

The total time for the evaluation including image capture is between 0.3 and 0.5s, although with the continued advancement in modern processor speeds this time can continue to be reduced.

The system is supported via long-distance diagnostics through a broadband telephone connection so real-time changes can be made to the system if new or existing specifications change in the future.

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